The affordable-housing asset institutional capital discovered: pad rental economics with infrastructure-age risk underneath.
Manufactured housing communities run the most stable operating model in residential real estate — residents own the homes, the community rents the pads, and the cost of moving a home makes tenancy durably sticky. The demand case writes itself from affordability arithmetic: pad rent plus home payment against the local cost of the cheapest site-built alternative, with the gap quantified from Census housing-cost data. The risks live elsewhere.
Infrastructure is the honest underwriting question for acquisitions: decades-old private water, sewer, and electrical systems carry replacement cycles the trailing financials never show, and the technical review’s job is to convert the systems’ age into a reserve schedule the coverage math must absorb. For ground-up communities the constraint is entitlement — zoning receptivity to new MHC supply is the scarcest input in the category — which the study treats as the gating condition it is.
Our community-housing work applies the same rigor as the firm’s RV-resort practice — the categories share pad economics, utility infrastructure, and small-operator management risk — with rent-positioning benchmarked against the regulated and market alternatives the resident actually faces, and expansion-pad potential analyzed as upside rather than counted in the base case.
Engagements are typically initiated by the borrower, with lender or CDC confirmation obtained before work begins — institutions apply differing rules, so sponsors should confirm the required path with their lending contact — and are delivered in 10 to 15 business days from complete project data, and built to the program framework that governs the credit — SBA SOP 50 10 8 coverage minimums of 1.15x operating and 1.00x global, the 37-factor structure of USDA RD Instruction 5001, or the 1.20x convention of conventional credit policy — with a ten-year pro forma, sensitivity at ±5/10/15 percent, rate stress to +3.0 percent, and Monte Carlo analysis as standard equipment.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. More than 4,000 feasibility studies completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $40.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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Schedule a ConversationIndependent feasibility studies since 1998 — 4,000+ engagements, $40.2 billion in evaluated project value. Standard delivery in 10 to 15 business days. Fiduciary duty to the lender and agency.